How to Quickly Categorize Transactions

Learn how to quickly categorize groups of transactions.

Written by Heather Phillips Updated over a week ago

The first time you create a Tiller Sheet, the Tiller Feedbot may pull up to three months of transaction data into your Transactions tab, or perhaps you want to manually enter finance data from a CSV export from your bank. In either case, it can be quite a lot of data, and it can feel a bit overwhelming to categorize it all.

While we recommend that you start categorizing transactions going forward from today, rather than looking back at old data, for some there’s a desire to keep the Transactions tab tidy and get it all properly tracked. We understand.

A built in feature of Google Sheets makes this a relatively straightforward process.

Sort your sheet by the “Description” column so that all the transactions with the same description are grouped together by clicking the sorting and filtering arrow and choosing to sort A→ Z or Z→ A.

Type or select the category for the first transaction in the group, such as "gas" for all Transactions from the Shell Station.

Click, hold and drag the blue square in the lower right of this first category cell down to the last row for that group of transactions.

How to handle transactions with the same description but a different category

What if you didn’t actually buy gas at the Shell station one day, but bought some snacks for the car ride home?